Morning Person is a weekly newsletter packed with obsessively-curated recommendations and ideas—let’s get to it!

🎧 “Storytime” with Seth Rogen: In creating a podcast, Seth could have phoned it in so easily. If he called a few celebrity friends to talk about their mutual love of Jennifer Aniston’s dinner parties, it would have been a hit. Instead, he invites friends to tell a story—a chance encounter with Paul Rudd at ‘Inglourious Basterds’, a trip to Córdoba gone wrong, a fight with a bear—which he punches up with cinematic sound mixing, to my immense delight.

📚 Filthy Animals by Brandon Taylor: Although Filthy Animals is officially a collection of short stories, it reads like a novel told from different perspectives, beginning with a young suicide survivor who attends a potluck and meets, then becomes romantically entangled with, two ballet dancers in an open relationship. Taylor’s collection has the same impact of watching a movie where the actors are so good you forget that they’re acting. Each of his tortured, emotionally vulnerable characters feel real. Their swirling, complicated internal worlds feel all the more poignant within the context of the last two years.